I am so amazingly professional!
Hello. I could write something terribly professional here about how I offer solutions etc etc. Fact is, sometimes I design stuff to an exacting brief and sometimes I just have complete creative freedom. Sometimes I am working with a precise corporate branding scheme and matching every corporate nuance and colour, sometimes I work with nothing but imagination and the brief of “I like blue”.
I have industry experience
I have worked full time in the Space, Defence, Telecoms and Broadcast Media industries. I am also part of the Defense/Martial Arts and Combat Sports community, and was inducted into the London International Martial Arts Hall Of Fame in 2007. I’ve worked with anything from location catering companies through to Cadburys, from small independent tv production companies to BBC and Channel5. I could go on, but I won’t, but it does lead me to think about adding a client section on here at some point.
Unfulfilled artistic cravings
As someone from a family of artists I had zero capability for making what was in my imagination appear accurately on paper in front of me using pen or ink or brush. At 16 I was writing software and fiddling around with the first personal computers. Rather than go down the technical “computer” route I opted for business studies, figuring out that I would always be technical and could come back to it after learning how to do business. I was told by one of my college tutors I would never go to University so I promptly did. I was the first student in my unversity to get internet access. My Thesis was on “The Internet as an Advertising Medium”.
I really, honestly know my stuff about this Interweb business
Most people would say “yeah…whatever” at this point. OK, so this is so long ago I had to explain what the Internet was and how it came about in the Thesis. Nowadays people just take it for granted. My first job was for an Internet Service Provider. My second job I physically met Vince Cerf at a conference. At the age of 22 I was the opening speaker at an international Internet Over Satellite conference. Some of my clients from the satellite world include NASA and Steven Spielbergs technical director Jon Mauldin.
Photography
I’ve always found that I had a creative yearning that needed to be expressed and at 16 I discovered Photography. I spent years ten years photographing landscapes. I had work published and an international exhibition of my work. The ten years, exhibition and millenium all co-incided in 2000, making me think it was time for a new challenge. My friend Nick Andrews who is a fashion photographer (just had his first photos published in Vogue…am very proud of him for that!) told me “why don’t you photograph people”. So I did.
I spent 2 years photographing actors, singers, models, everything and everything. In 2002 I submitted my portfolio to Fujifilm and found myself being accepted onto the Fujifilm Professional Photographer “envisage” program. I did ok, got published all over the world, mainly in martial arts and action film magazines. At some point, I think it was 2007 I got hired by Canon to be a Stills Assistant to a famous japanese photographer and I set his lighting up with his team flown in from Japan. I learnt more in 2 days about lighting with these guys than I knew in 17 years of photography. I also got to body double Hidetoshi Nakata as I was the same height and had equally rabid hair at the time.
Why use me
I’ve always been incredibly focused and energetic about everything I do. I like to do as professional a job as I can. I’m very creative. I probably know how to do what you want.
Why the weird name?
Defensive Media came about when I was made redundant from a job in the Defence Industry (you know..tanks and bombs, satellites, frikking lasers etc). I thought maybe I would have to earn a living with my new found design skills as well as camera, marketing and business strategy so the name also could cover work I had done for the “other” defense industry Combat Sports and Martial Arts. Luckily I did find a job and instead of working on this site I ended up re-building my garden. After all, that’s what garden leave is for isn’t it!
Evolving from hacking around to being able to do anything I hope!
Now what gets interesting is that for many years I realised I hacked around doing my design work for my personal/photographic endeavours. Working as a fully-fledged professional with all the tools of CS4 and CS5 at my disposal I don’t have that luxury. I have to be able to make exactly what my employers want, from a blank canvas every time.
So my skills have improved and increased and my thirst for design knowledge has grown. Right now I am going back to basics and learning Illustrator. I want to be able to get what is in my head as a design exactly down onto the screen in front of me. It’s like I have come full circle and can actually put pen to paper and what is in my head is starting to fulfill itself in front of me. So, the site needs to be updated with my work on it and also I think it would be useful for people to see my ideas or “scraps” if you like as I learn how to negotiate different design paths.
Often the key to getting good at design is repeated and frequent use of the various programs. I spend most of my time during the day in InDesign designing marketing documents. I am currently using overlays from photoshop to fuse into InDesign documents to get the best of both worlds. What is interesting is that out there on the Internet there are sites that have resources for designers to use to make life easier. Patterns, Vector Shapes, Brushes, Fonts etc. Its my intention to learn how to make these all myself, so if a brush that I want doesn’t exist then I will go and make it and so on.
Right, bugger off and have a look around the site!
So, take a look around the site. Let me know what you like and don’t like and what you want to see more of and if you think I can help you with your graphic design, website design, corporate communications, brand identity, photography, etc then please get in touch.
Cheers
Mike
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